https://youtu.be/h2Scc6fGz9o
T-Mobile’s latest iPhone 5 ad is thoroughly in “The Internet is a series of tubes” territory. It’s kind of weird.
The advertisement shows fluorescent gak blasting from two massive PVC sewage pipes. These pipes are meant to represent “the Internet” while the gak itself is supposed to be, I guess, the brightly colored slime of the Internet’s data streams. T-Mobile says more electric kool-aid sewage can spray through their pipes because they aren’t as clogged up.
I guess what I find so weird about this ad is that not only does it pick a visual metaphor for data that was widely mocked when Senator Ted Stevens used it to describe the way the Internet works, but T-Mobile’s whole argument here seems to be: “No one subscribes with us, so you’ve got our whole LTE network all to yourself.”
Doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence, does it?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
